It’s been a very hot and sunny week in this small coastal town, with no sign of the north-easterly breeze that more usually cuts through the rising temperature. This image from some similar sunny day back in 2013 was taken by squinting into the sun, with the light managing to make the shingle look like piled coins from Smaug’s lair.
This photograph, taken back in the high summer of 2013, represents that high-risk moment when I carried my camera out into the sea with me as I bobbed about. It was one of those silvery, milky days, great light, slight haze, and the water suitably warm(ish).
As perfectly arranged as those flying ceramic ducks fastened in place to sitting room walls, a foursome of black-headed gulls take-wing on their way out to sea.
Taken one damp, misty morning on the beach; an instance where the camera’s struggle to arrest the detail of a moving subject produces a more apposite expression of the subject.
When Whitstable gets very busy, those-in-the-know eschew the more popular bits of the beach and head-off towards the West Beach, where you won’t get a pint or a bag of chips, but you will get treated to the impressionist splendour of the colonies of wild flowers covering the shingle. Throw in a few old wooden boats, their ice-cream colours peeling appealingly, and you’ve got a a little patch of painterly perfection.
A few more from the gloom of Seasalter beach, the scarcity of light and sprinkling of illuminations across the horizon producing some satisfying results. That done, it was time for a mince pie back in the warm.
On a whim one drab December afternoon, we drove out to the nicely forlorn stretch of beach at Seasalter just as the last of the meagre light was leaving the sky. I was after a bit of pre-solstice melancholy and some smudging, so went for long exposures and a touch of de-focusing mid-shot. Lots of grain and seasonal desaturation ensued, and some spectral appearances too.
Red's Kingdom 